Unwanted sexually explicit spam

I am getting this sad trash emailed / spammed each day. It seems that as quick as I block it more and larger quantities are being e-mailed. How can I stop it from even appearing on my e-mail? I know I can use a spam filter but the sad creators of this muck are deliberately miss-spelling the titles to get round it. Ideally I don’t even want to get these e-mails downloading into my inbox. How can I stop them? Is there anyway of reporting the email account’s that are sending this rubbish?

To prevent unwanted spam you need to prevent them from getting your email in the first place. Once they have it you can usually expect to continue getting spam for a very long time. here are some things to keep in mind.

1. If you receive a solicitation email with a link to be removed from their mailing list DO NOT use it. Many spammers mass mail to email addresses at random hoping to get some hits. By using the"remove" link you are only verifying that there is a live person at that email address.

2. Do not publish your email on any web page. There are "bots" thats will scour pages throughout the internet to grab those email addresses.

3. Be very careful when sigingin up for any service or account that requires your email address.

My best method of reducing spam is using different email accounts. I have three main email accounts.

My yahoo account is my spam account. I use that account whenever I need to sign up for something and an email address is required AND I feel that they may share the info or where I never really need to hear from that company. I may have to go to Yahoo right after signing up to activate the account. But, I never check that email and yahoo (and others) have pretty good spam control already.

I also have my email address through my ISP. I use this for accounts where I do business on a regular basis and want to hear from that company if that need to contact me: Ebay, Paypal, etc.

My third account is my personal account which I only use for friends and family. I never use if for creating any accounts.

Once you have spam a new email address is the only real way to get rid of it. Next note 1 to 3 in post #4, particularly the bit about not putting your email address in open text on any website.

The spammers sell CD's to each other so it just gets worse with time. Filtering risks losing genuine email, often requires a lot of time to get right, and never totally cures it.

#6 is well worth noting but it won't cure spam once you've got it, nor will it help if you then publish it on a website.

As a linked aside I would suggest you don't use your actual name as part of an email address. Spam is bad enough but allowing anyone to guess who you are (with various worrying scams about) can be even worse.

A few more points. You mentioned, mis-spelling titles. True, but they also do a whole lot more than that. Using HTML, .gif pictures, encoding, spoof source addresses and so forth.

Tracing the true source is rarely possible unless you are an expert with more at your disposal than a mere PC. In any event a great deal of spam is being sent out unwittingly by infected machines (ie an innocent source).

Most servers have an email address (abuse "at" ....) for reporting spam. Unfortunately often they are under-resourced, and they never reply so you've little real idea whether it's helping or not.

So, change your email address then guard it well. Try not to give it to those idiots who multi-address their "you'll all love this" stuff to everyone under the sun without any attempt to hide the recipients (probably because they've never heard of BCC or anything else about computer security).

If i need to sign up anywhere i use a disposable email either at yahoo or hotmail.

I did sign up with one company and oddly enough next day there were 80+ spam mails in that inbox. . . .

Personally i use mailwasher, it does take a little setting up and tuning but it rarely gets any wrong these days and those it does are actually my fault in draconian rules some are friends fault for not addressing the email to me so it shows up as not to me.

Just checked my pop3 mail, 3 genuine mails and about 30 spam, way less than it used to be. a lot of companies now use the word spam in the subject line to make it easieer for ppl to block them, although i do have a couple of those in my friends list as I am interested in their products and they are not real spammers. I don`t even have to bounce emails anymore

Interesting to note that gmail and others got folk spammed from day 1. It seems I placed too much emphasis on leaving your email addy on the web (maybe because that's where mine originally came from). Many possibilities....

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